As for training a bit longer than average before testing, it seems like a good idea to get in a bit more practice time but there is also a danger of simply ingraining bad technique over many years

I'm not sure I follow... how is this different from training for the same total amount of time with a test in the middle? Are we to assume that the day of the test is the primary means of getting feedback to correct 'bad technique'?

Quote:

When I once told a teacher I'd been training almost eight years and still hadn't got shodan he was shocked and stated bluntly "Either you are very unskilful or your teacher wasn't very good".

If he was a teacher from the same organization, who knew exactly what test you were expected to take, how often you trained, and what the standard for passing was, then OK.

But IMO a lot of the differences between expectations for how long it should take to reach a certain grade have to do with the fact that the grades are kind of arbitrary -- any organization can look at people of different skill levels and decide they'll call ____ a shodan so all the people less skilled are ikkyu, nikkyu, etc and all the people more skilled are nidan, sandan, etc. They could just as easily have picked some other level of skill and called it shodan and the names of the rest of the ranks would shift accordingly. Like using degrees to describe temperature... you can always say one thing is hotter than another, but anyone could make up their own scale for what numbers to assign... the 'standard' ones are Celcius, Farenheit, and Kelvin... but those were just invented by people to have a common language... I could take a thermometer and put numbers 1-10 wherever I wanted... it just aids in communication when more people share the same scale...